Page 203 of Tenderfoot

Shanti got on the phone to do her phone tree bit.

And as it went at the Oasis, within fifteen minutes, we had the makings of a party.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“BAD REPUTATION”

(JOAN JETT)

The next morning, while Javi and I were repeatedly bumping into each other in my tiny kitchen while he handled coffee and I made our smoothies (my famous Creamsicle one! Javi’s second favorite), I decided I liked his kitchen better.

It was a whole lot bigger. Plenty of room for Javi’s big, tall body along with mine to move around and do our thing without getting in each other’s way.

I was going to the fridge to put away the almond milk and yogurt, he was coming from the fridge with the creamer, when we slammed into each other, front to front.

Fortunately, this didn’t cause us to be covered in milk and yogurt.

I made a shift to round him but was foiled in this effort when Javi’s arm curved around me, and he hauled me closer.

This almost caused us to be covered in milk and yogurt, but luckily, my reflexes were quick.

I tipped my head back to look at him to see him grinning down at me.

“I can handle all the pink if I get to brush up against you every day makin’ coffee,” he murmured.

Oo.

I liked his way of looking at my tiny kitchen a whole lot better.

I gave him a smile.

He kissed it off my face.

Then he let me go and sorted our coffees.

I put the stuff away in the fridge.

And for the first time, shuffling around it with Javi, I fell in love with my tiny kitchen.

It happened in the early afternoon.

What we knew at this juncture was, both Brody and Arthur were trying to pull images they could use off the videos in order to attempt facial recognition. I didn’t know all the ins and outs of it, but Javi explained they needed a relatively high resolution, full-face image. They then were going to start with narrowing the search area to Phoenix and its surroundings. After that, the software would run through all sorts of images on the Internet, particularly social media, to see if it could find matches.

This could, we’d been warned, take days.

Or even weeks.

Maybe even months.

No way around it, we had a long wait, and with no other leads, we were hunkered down to find one or start receiving the names of the women we could contact to let them know Trev was out of the picture and the videos were gone. Or, if we lucked out, find the one who could hire people to handle Trev (and alas fail) in an attempt to make her nightmare go away.

Javi still swung by to take me to work that day, because the NI&S bodyguard assignments were still in effect. I loved riding with him, but my guess was, it would begin to be a drag to cut out of what he was doing just to take me to work. Not to mention, we all figured, with the amount of time that had passed since anything happened, the danger was over, so he probably didn’t have to.

However, when it finally happened, we knew it wasn’t.

You see, Willow came in early to bake, so she left early.

And she was leaving.

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